High-tech tools find body in Indiana pond

Jul. 19, 2013
|

A photo of the car the Plainfield Police Department recovered that is believed to be that of Morgan Johnson, found in a Hendricks County retention pond on Friday, July 19, 2013. / Courtesy of Plainfield Police Department

by Kristine Guerra, The Indianapolis Star

by Kristine Guerra, The Indianapolis Star

PLAINFIELD, Ind. -- More than two years had passed since anyone heard from Morgan Johnson.

His family and friends organized repeated searches for the Plainfield man, 27, when he went missing. Plainfield police - though criticized by Johnson's family for not investigating more aggressively - said they never gave up on finding him.

It was that determination, investigators said, along with the discovery of some helpful technology, that led them Friday morning to a small, murky retention pond in Plainfield. Below the surface was the Pontiac Grand Am that Johnson last drove, and inside it was a body; an autopsy Saturday will determine whether it is the missing man's as well as a cause of death. Also still under investigation is how the car wound up in the pond.

Plainfield police Lt. Jeff Stephens, a detective who took over Johnson's case about two months ago, credited the technology - particularly a tracing method that he recently learned in a cellphone forensics class, as well as the sonar device with which police finally found the car.

Johnson was reported missing in May 2011 after leaving the extended-stay hotel where he was living in the Plainfield area. At the time, he was working as a customer service representative at Brightpoint in Plainfield.

He said he was taking a few days off to attend a grandfather's funeral in Washington, D.C., but his family said he never made it there.

It wasn't until about a month later that authorities issued a "Silver Alert" seeking help in the search for Johnson. By then, widespread publicity was circulating around the still-unsolved disappearance of Indiana University student Lauren Spierer in early June 2011.

In July 2011, Johnson's family filed a civil rights complaint against the Plainfield Police Department, alleging racism and mishandling of the missing-person investigation.

In the complaint filed by Ann and Carl Smith with the Indiana Civil Rights Commission, the family said police had failed to explore all clues, did not check Johnson's computer nor conduct an aerial search for his car.

Plainfield police denied the allegations at the time and said detectives followed up on every lead.

Investigators on Friday said that since May 2011, virtually every detective in the Plainfield department had worked on the case.

Police officials said they had been in touch Friday with Johnson's family, who did not reply to phone messages from The Indianapolis Star.

Avery Garrett, a friend of Johnson, said he has mixed emotions about Friday's discovery.

"I kind of knew something like this would happen," he said. "But I also kind of held that hope that he was somewhere and something happened to him, but he was still OK."

Garrett commended Stephens for not giving up on the search.

"He looked at the facts," he said. "He took ownership of the case."

Stephens said a course in cellphone forensics showed him how to track the last signal from Johnson's phone to a specific area. The technology revealed that Johnson was checking voice mail before his phone died - and that he was within a mile of the pond where the car was found.

But at least 15 ponds were in the area of that last signal, and Plainfield investigators said they searched 13 on Thursday.

Earlier this week, Stephens got in touch with Team Watters Sonar and Search Recovery Inc., an Illinois-based nonprofit that specializes in assisting law enforcement in recovering remains, vehicles and other items.

Friday morning, the group's drone boat with sonar technology detected Johnson's car in a pond just north of Interstate 70. At the bottom of the boat was a transducer that took an ultrasound-like photo of the car, submerged at least 7 feet below the surface.

A conventional boat, officials said, could not have accessed the retention pond, which appeared almost too small to hold a car.

"We really never thought we were going to find anything in the pond. If it weren't for this boat, that pond would not have been searched," said Dennis Watters, who co-founded Team Watters with his wife, Tammy.